Mr. Speaker, the minister has a lot more education in the law than I have. I am a lawyer, a small-town country lawyer, and I guess sometimes we just do not see things as well as the academic people who live in ivory towers do.
If I understand his overarching message today, it is that Parliament must respect the Constitution in every detail and that somehow the Conservatives have this wrong. Last year in the election campaign, the Prime Minister made health care the centrepiece of his campaign. That is what we heard about: health care. Now in his media interviews he says he has accomplished a lot, that he has the cities agenda pushed through and he has early child learning is in place.
Maybe I got something wrong in our law school in Saskatchewan, where Howard McConnell was my constitutional law professor, but it is my understanding that under section 92 of our Constitution and other provisions, municipal government is the exclusive jurisdiction of the provinces. Under the exclusive jurisdiction of the provinces is health care and the exclusive jurisdiction over education is with the provinces.
I think the minister has to be honest in acknowledging that the government, through its spending power and other means, has invaded those areas of the Constitution. In my opinion, it has violated the spirit of that Constitution by doing so. This government spends more time invading provincial jurisdictions and evading the Constitution of this country than any other government we have had in our country. For the minister to preach about being a constitutional purist in the House of Commons really flies in the face of the record of the government.